Meet the team behind downtown Eugene’s safety efforts

Every morning at 9, a handful of people, each representing a piece of downtown Eugene’s safety net, meet in a basement room on 10th Avenue.

The participants include officers with the Eugene Police Department’s downtown unit, a Lane County Behavioral Health professional, local security known as Red Hats and, since January, peer navigators contracted by EPD. 

The roundtable check-ins are part of a collaborative structure in place to connect vulnerable people in the neighborhood to services and make downtown feel and look more safe. Team members know a number of local unhoused people by name, and in the meetings, they delegate work among themselves based on their individual relationships with those people. 

“This team has engaged a lot of people that I don’t think would have got help otherwise,” said EPD officer Bo Rankin, who specializes in crisis intervention. “It seems to be having an impact.”

Homelessness, mental health crises and substance use downtown have long been points of contention in Eugene, and the city’s approach to the problem has evolved over years. Last month, just over 3,000 people were unhoused in Eugene, according to county data, which doesn’t track homelessness by ward or neighborhood. 

Two credentialed peer navigators contracted from Ideal Option, an outpatient recovery organization that also works with the county’s jail deflection program, are the newest addition to the table and a $249,417 city investment into the downtown effort. 

The two, Whitney Williams and Ashley Raman, use their past experience overcoming addiction, being unsheltered and navigating the criminal justice system to help connect people to resources. 

The pair, along with supervisor Arturo Zamudio, respond to calls on a direct line, usually from business owners, between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday to Friday. They also patrol the neighborhood on foot, with a goal to respond to incidents within 10 to 15 minutes. They also text with the rest of the downtown safety team frequently through the day. 

“I get really, really pumped coming to work,” Raman said. “We’re helping people.”

Everyone’s needs and definition of success look different, Raman and Williams said. Some people need substance treatment, medical help or housing. Others need assistance with the courts, getting insurance and personal identification, and transport to appointments. 

Sometimes, Williams and Raman said they tell their own stories of living on the street, losing and regaining custody of their children and battling addiction to show people they’re not alone in their experiences and feelings of fear, loss, shame and guilt. 

“I’m seeing how we’re connecting, knowing when we gotta back off a little bit, knowing when we should just leave a card and maybe run back into them again,” Raman said. “It’s a case-by-case thing.”

Connecting to the system

The peer navigators rely on a constellation of nonprofits for referrals, including Reveille Foundation, which provides transportation, as well as HIV Alliance and White Bird Clinic. 

“There’s trust that’s been broken with people out here because they’ve been told, ‘Hey, there’s all these housing programs, or this Measure 110 (drug-treatment) program,’ and then they go to access the services, and there’s a waiting list, or there’s all this red tape,” Zamudio said. 

He continued: “It’s been a big part to reestablish a relationship with them, letting them know ‘No, we will show up. We will go with you.’”

Between early January and late March, peer navigators referred 59 people in the downtown core to more than 30 services, according to a quarterly report. Just over 85% of those referrals were marked as complete, meaning at least one “meaningful engagement” between the person and a service provider was documented. 

The downtown safety team leans on Community Court, the restorative justice program for lower-level, nonviolent offenses under the Eugene Municipal Court. The program operates every Wednesday, and service providers set up tables in the first-floor lobby in hopes of connecting with participants who are there for appointments. 

Peer navigators often direct people there to encourage engagement with broader systems instead of addressing people’s short-term needs on the street and, in their eyes, inadvertently blocking an opportunity to get someone long-term help, Zamudio said. 

“Handing someone a sandwich right here, or something to drink, would be great, but that means that person is going to stay in that downtown area and in the same situation they’re in,” he said.

Limited options

If someone appears to be a danger to themselves or others, often those experiencing mental health crises, peer navigators said they request help from the police and co-responder Jose Manriquez, a county behavioral health official. 

Manriquez helps enter eligible people into the county’s Forensic Intensive Treatment Team, which aims to transition people with behavioral health disorders to long-term care.

“It might take about 20 different contacts, or a small window of opportunity where the individual is open for services,” Manriquez said. “So we go ahead and act on that.”

Those interactions don’t always end how the team would like. Rankin and Manriquez said they have limited options when people experiencing severe mental health emergencies refuse services beyond sending them to a jail cell or a hospital emergency room bed. 

Rankin, the Eugene police officer, described the lack of a stabilization center in Lane County, where people could be involuntarily admitted for mental health care, as a “massive, gaping hole.” The county and the city of Springfield are slowly moving forward on the project amid opposition from neighbors. 

If people experiencing mental health emergencies aren’t willing to work with team members, “then we’re kind of stuck,” Rankin said. “Someone who’s really in crisis, which is elevating to criminal behavior or dangerousness, it puts us in a bad spot. If you had this crisis center, it’s somewhere that would take almost all of these people.”

In those cases now, peer navigators visit people in jail on Fifth Avenue to form a plan for them to receive services upon their release, Zamudio said. Sometimes incarceration triggers people to accept help who previously refused it, he said.

“That could be a moment of change,” he said. “That plan, upon release, can make a difference to someone’s world.”

The Red Hats

Three security guards known as the Red Hats are the business-facing prong of the downtown safety team. They are hired by Downtown Eugene, Inc., a not-for-profit association of downtown business and property owners and funded by a service district fee. 

The Red Hats work from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, responding to calls on a direct line. They primarily respond to reports of people sitting or sleeping outside their property, and also offer some safety measures for downtown businesses, like escorts to vehicles.  

The guides ask people to leave properties of businesses that have filed Trespass Letters of Consent, a legal document that grants police the ability to remove people from their property without asking first. Guides themselves don’t have that authority. 

“We will talk to them like, ‘Hey, there’s a letter of trespass here, gotta have you moving along,’” said downtown guide Aaron Kottas.

When guides interact with someone who needs help, they contact Manriques, the county mental health professional, and the peer navigators with Ideal Option, he said.

The Red Hat program has been around for over a decade and has attracted controversy. A 2013 Eugene Weekly story scrutinized how the guides — as well as guards hired by a separate private security firm — contributed to the displacement of unhoused people.

In April, the guides responded to 96 incidents and over half of them involved trespassing, according to a monthly report. About a third of those responses were self-initiated by the Red Hats and roughly 50% came from phone calls. 

Is it working?

Members of the downtown safety team say yes. Others aren’t sure, at least yet. 

Rankin, the EPD officer who has worked in the area for more than a decade, said he has recently noticed fewer people experiencing mental health crises downtown. The neighborhood “definitely feels different,” he said.

“There’s always been, and it seems like there always will be, a few people who just escape the system,” Rankin said. “They don’t want our help. Of course, I would like to help those people. But as far as chronically mentally ill people who are causing trouble downtown, it seems like there’s less and less of that.”

Two individuals with a history of chronic downtown disturbances got connected to services in the last month, Rankin said. The quarterly report includes anonymized accounts of people who recently got help: a mother and her infant child; a female homeless veteran; a client who pursued a treatment goal through a major surgery. 

“In the last few months, there’s been several times throughout each week where I’ve called Art and been like, ‘Man, I am on fire. I feel so good,’” Williams, the peer navigator, said. “It’s not just one particular person, it’s how we can get them literally connected to everything they need.”

One leader within the Community Court, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said they have anecdotally observed a much higher participation rate with the program in recent months. 

Police data from 2025, shows drops in most violent and property crime downtown compared to the year before. Arrests and citations for trespassing, which the department prioritized for enforcement, increased by more than 1,000 compared to 2024. 

The number of unhoused people in Eugene has stayed relatively steady for the last four years. 

Seth Kirkpatrick, a 40-year-old Air Force veteran born and raised in Oregon, said he has lived on the streets of downtown Eugene “off and on” for about five years and has struggled to find permanent housing, despite efforts to engage with the appropriate processes and paperwork. 

“They tell me to go do all these things, like jump through hoops, and I’ve done all that, and I still get denied,” Kirkpatrick said. 

He said he is two years sober, but has lost many of his friends to addiction, particularly fentanyl. Every day, Kirkpatrick said he checks on friends he made during treatment who live under the Washington Jefferson Bridge to “see if they’re alive or not.”

“I went to treatment with flying colors, and there was nothing for me afterwards,” he said.

Kirkpatrick said guides with the Red Hats have ignored him when he asked them questions. He said he hadn’t heard of the city’s new peer navigators, but that they’d “probably” be a helpful addition to the existing providers downtown. 

“We don’t ask for help,” Kirkpatrick said. “We kind of just go figure it out. But it would be nice if somebody could actually show me what there is out there.”

He expressed frustration with nonprofits that have simply handed him “a sandwich and a shirt.” 

“That’s not what I need,” Kirkpatrick said. 

The case for business

It will take longer for downtown’s business owners to see significant improvement, said Katie Wilgus, the executive director of Downtown Eugene, Inc. and the downtown strategist for the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce. The community has long raised concerns about perceptions of danger downtown driving away their business.

“We have a long history downtown of having struggles,” Wilgus said. “The ship is large and it’s going to take a little time to really feel that shift in direction, but it’s happening. I think what I’m hearing is at least optimism from our business owners.”

Several business owners expressed frustration over what they saw as a lack of city investment downtown in interviews with Lookout Eugene-Springfield. Some said they have stopped trying to use the existing safety resources because of past experiences where they felt police weren’t responsive or effective. 

“We see police and city people right smack down in there, and they do absolutely nothing,” said Jim Ralph, executive director of The Shedd Institute. “So why do we call?”

Ethan Clevenger, who owns Porterhouse Clothing & Supply and serves as president of Downtown Eugene Merchants, said Ideal Option’s peer navigators are a proactive service that has been missing from the neighborhood’s safety net, but the program “desperately needs” more capacity and awareness. 

“It’s amazing how many business owners down here have no clue about any of the resources available to them,” Clevenger said. He added: “We really need folks out here, around the clock, checking on those hot spots.”

Kottas, the guide with the Red Hats, said he hasn’t received any recent feedback from business owners on the state of neighborhood safety, but the peer navigators have sped up the internal process of connecting people with services. 

“In previous history, it would take quite a bit of effort to get things to move,” Kottas said. 

Expansion on the horizon

Last week, leaders within the business community and Eugene City Councilor Randy Groves announced a pilot expansion to the Red Hat program funded by a private donor, Darren Sparks, who formerly owned west Eugene-based Rosen Aviation. 

The pilot, which will run from July 1 to Sept. 30, will bring on two more guides through Downtown Eugene, Inc. The organization will also launch a pair of new four-person teams of “ambassadors,” who will work directly with business owners, offer directions to pedestrians, and connect people to services, and “beautifiers,” who will do cleanup work. 

The new teams will be staffed by residents of Everyone Village, a transitional shelter program in west Eugene for people experiencing homelessness. The teams will operate into the evening and over the weekend, an extension of current operating hours, but exact schedules are still being finalized.

Sparks said he sees the new teams and the existing peer navigators as “sister initiatives” that should grow at the same pace, and, he hopes, make them both more successful. 

Downtown Eugene Inc. will collect data before and after the program, including surveys and meetings with business owners, to assess its effectiveness. The organization is also considering assembling a small focus group of business owners for more frequent check-ins.

The initial expansion is budgeted at $139,795, with an additional $550,000 earmarked for the future, he said. Leaders of the project are seeking matching funds to give the expansion a three-year runway, he said.

“We’re trying to amplify what is already there and not add another layer of complexity,” Sparks said. ““We all know all this is new, but we want to pay close attention to them, and if they continue to succeed, we think there’s a really strong marriage between the two programs.”